Automatic Dynamic Load Balancing for a Crack Propagation Application

Automatic, adaptive load balancing is essential for handling load imbalance that may occur during parallel finite element simulations involving mesh adaptivity, nonlinear material behavior and other localized effects. This paper demonstrates the successful application of a measurement-based dynamic load balancing concept to the finite element analysis of elasto-plastic wave propagation and dynamic fracture events. The simulations are performed with the aid of a parallel framework for unstructured meshes called ParFUM, which is based on Charm++ and Adaptive MPI (AMPI) and involves migratable user-level threads. The performance was analyzed using Projections, a performance analysis and post factum visualization tool. The bottlenecks to scalability are identified and eliminated using a variety of strategies resulting in performance gains ranging from moderate to highly significant.